The computer science degree that wasn’t (PDF) proved the undoing of Scott Thompson at Yahoo (YHOO).

The struggling Web portal today named Ross Levinsohn its interim chief executive after Thompson resigned. Presumably, Levinsohn’s bachelor’s degree in communications from American University checks out. So what else is on his résumé? For the past two years he was Yahoo’s head of global media. Levinsohn built a reputation for online media savvy at News Corp. (NWS), where he worked from 2000 to 2006 and rose from running FoxSports.com to overseeing all of Rupert Murdoch’s Web ambitions as head of Interactive Media.

In that role he was instrumental in one of Murdoch’s more disastrous new media forays—the purchase of MySpace and its parent company Intermix for $580 million in July 2005. Hard as it may be to remember, MySpace dwarfed Facebook at the time, with 22 million monthly visitors to Facebook’s 8 million, and was still rising to its 2008 peak of more than 75 million monthly visitors. That story ended with News Corp finally cutting its losses and selling the largely abandoned property for $35 million last year—not exactly a highlight on anyone’s curriculum vitae.

Still, as reports of his promotion have pointed out, Levinsohn took part in MySpace’s greatest coup: inking a $900 million deal with Google (GOOG) to run the site’s search function and place some of its ads. Yet according to Stealing Myspace, Julia Angwin’s excellent corporate history, Levinsohn played a background role in the deal. The point man was Scout.com founder Jim Heckman, who pulled Google into the bidding and hammered out terms with its negotiator, Tim Armstrong, during a corporate retreat at Pebble Beach, Calif., in July 2006.

Levinsohn was one of a pair of executives who gave “final approval.” Angwin portrays Levinsohn primarily as a pawn in Murdoch’s games of corporate intrigue. When Murdoch put him in charge of the entire Internet empire, writes Angwin, the “huge elevation” was a way to make sure that Murdoch could dominate the relationship and “interfere as much as he liked.”

Levinsohn and MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson never really got along, especially after News Corp. moved the company office from hip Santa Monica to staid Beverly Hills. And Levinsohn, said colleagues, referred to managing the fast-growing MySpace as “holding a tiger by the tail.” News Corp. relieved him of that problem in late 2006. Now that he has hold of the wounded animal that is Yahoo, Levinsohn may come to miss the tiger.

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For the next two decades, MySpace will be undergoing regular privacy assessments from the Federal Trade Commission. The company was accused by the FTC of sharing its users’ personal information with advertisers, all without disclosing that fact to the users themselves.

Rather than fight the charges, the once-mighty social site chose to settle; its full consent order is embedded below. The company had access to users’ age, gender, and full name, as well as detailed lists of interests, hobbies, and friends — and such information is all immensely valuable to marketers of all stripes. While MySpace was promising users it would not share personally identifiable information (leading to individually targeted advertisements), the FTC saw a different story unfolding:

MySpace has been ordered to stop overstating the privacy it provides its users, to set up and maintain a privacy program, and to undergo regular privacy reviews conducted by a “qualified, objective, independent third-party professional” every two years for the next 20 years.

Also, for the next five years, MySpace will have to turn over to the FTC a ton of documentation, including internal communications about privacy, user complaints, any legal or law enforcement documents related to consumer information privacy, and all relevant plans, audits, and reports on MySpace’s information privacy.

MySpace has two months to comply with the order. We’ve got a pool as to which will expire first: the 20-year order or the company itself. MySpace, once the be-all-end-all of online social networking, experienced a long and dramatic fall from grace, at the end of which it was sold for a paltry $30 million, a fraction of its $580 million purchase price when News Corp. acquired the network in 2005.

We contacted former MySpace executives who were at the company during the period the FTC was concerned about; none had any comment on the situation.

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WASHINGTON: Social networking company Myspace settled allegations that it misrepresented the way it handled user information, agreeing with the US regulators to adopt a privacy program and submit to audits.

The 20-year settlement bars Myspace from sharing users' personal information without first giving notice and getting permission, the Federal Trade Commission said today in an e- mailed statement. The settlement follows similar consent decrees with Google, Facebook and Twitter as the FTC steps up enforcement of privacy protections on the internet.

Myspace, disregarding its published privacy policy, provided advertisers with information that enabled them to identify users who were viewing particular pages on the site, the FTC said. "Advertisers could use the Friend ID to locate a user's Myspace profile to obtain personal information publicly available on the profile and, in most instances, the user's full name," the FTC said.

"Advertisers also could combine the user's real name and other personal information with additional information to link broader Web-browsing activity to a specific individual."

False statements
The FTC also alleged that Myspace made false statements under a legal framework that allows US companies to transfer personal data from the European Union to the US. Myspace falsely claimed it had complied with the so-called Safe Harbor principles, the agency said.

Myspace, based in Beverly-Hills, California, is a unit of Specific Media, which bought the company from News in June. Pop singer and actor Justin Timberlake took a minority stake in the company when it was sold. Specific Media said at the time Timberlake would help develop a new strategy for the company.

The episodes that prompted the agencies' allegations occurred before Specific Media took control, according to FTC filings. "One of our first actions after acquiring Myspace was to thoroughly examine the company's business practices and, where applicable, make improvements," Specific Media said today in a statement. "A major focus of this review was to ensure that Myspace delivered advertisements to consumers in a manner that safeguarded their privacy."

Myspace said the FTC settlement should "put any questions regarding Myspace's pre-acquisition advertising practices behind us."

"The FTC wants companies to be honest with consumers and accurately inform them on how they are using their personal information," Daren Orzechowski, a partner with White & Case LLP in New York who focuses on information technology legal matters, said in a statement. "The FTC's action against Myspace is another step toward forcing companies to be more transparent about their privacy practices."

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MIAMI, Fla. — On an old, long-unused MySpace page, Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman made some disparaging comments about Mexicans and also referred triumphantly to his escape from 2005 legal troubles stemming from his confrontation with law enforcement officers. The 2005-dated page, confirmed as authentic Wednesday by Zimmerman’s attorney Mark O’Mara, also mentions a 7-year-old domestic violence incident between Zimmerman and a former girlfriend, and the page includes several photos.

Zimmerman, 28, is charged with second-degree murder in the Feb. 26 shooting of the 17-year-old Martin in the central Florida city of Sanford. The case has sparked racial tensions around the country because Martin, who was unarmed, was black, while Zimmerman has a white father and Hispanic mother. Martin’s family and supporters claim he was a victim of racial profiling Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in the community where Martin was shot, has claimed Martin attacked him and that he fired only in self-defense.

On the MySpace paged called “onlytobeakingagain,” Zimmerman uses the name “Joe G” and discusses leaving his hometown of Manassas, Va., and how much he misses his friends. Then he veers into a slang-filled riff — with many words misspelled — involving Mexicans who lived in the area. “I don’t miss driving around scared to hit mexicans walkin on the side of the street, soft (expletive) wanna be thugs messin with peoples cars when they aint around (what are you provin, that you can dent a car when no ones watchin) don’t make you a man in my book,” Zimmerman writes on the page. “Workin 96 hours to get a decent pay check, gettin knifes pulled on you by every mexican you run into!” he adds, providing no details about these alleged incidents. The existence of the MySpace page was first reported by The Miami Herald. Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump said Wednesday that prosecutors could use Zimmerman’s MySpace comments against him.

“It’s not just speculation and innuendo. He has a history and a habit of profiling people,” Crump said. “He thinks certain things about certain racial groups.”A statement posted on a Zimmerman defense site run by O’Mara concedes that the comments “will cast Mr. Zimmerman in a less-than-favorable light” and that they could become evidence in the case. The statement says there will be no comment on the MySpace statements for that reason, but it does confirm that the posts were by Zimmerman.

O’Mara also said on the website that an accountant and former Internal Revenue Service agent has been chosen to oversee Zimmerman’s legal defense fund, which has collected more than $200,000 so far. The fund will be used to pay legal fees and for Zimmerman’s living expenses. Two August 2005 blog posts on the site make reference to Zimmerman’s legal problems. In one, Zimmerman exults about how two felony charges stemming from a physical altercation outside a bar with a law enforcement officer were dropped to a misdemeanor. “The man knows he was wrong,” reads part of the post. Ultimately, the misdemeanor charge was also dropped when Zimmerman completed a pretrial diversion program that included an anger management course.

The second post mentions a legal battle with an “ex-hoe,” likely a reference to a 2005 incident in which a girlfriend accused Zimmerman of attacking her. He was not charged in that case, and on the blog post Zimmerman writes that the woman “tried her hardest, but the judge saw through it!”Zimmerman’s wife testified during his bail hearing last month that her husband told her he was actually defending himself in that incident, not the other way around. Crump, however, said Zimmerman’s comments about the legal issues are telling.

“You think you can always get away with stuff,” Crump said. “Every time I go to court, I win. I beat it.”
The social media world has been a key aspect of the Martin case. It was via such sites as Twitter and Facebook that discussion and outrage began to build nationally because police did not initially arrest Zimmerman, citing Florida’s “stand your ground” self-defense law as the reason.

It has also played a part in the public images of both Martin and Zimmerman. On a former Facebook page of Martin’s, for example, some critics of how the teenager has been portrayed noted possible references to marijuana use. Martin was in Sanford with his father because he had been suspended from his Miami school over discovery of a plastic baggie containing marijuana residue. The statement on the Zimmerman defense website says that scrutinizing the MySpace postings “invites scrutiny of the social medial accounts of all parties involved.

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That’s the mantra spewing from the majority of media outlets out there these days, and it has been for some time. After a few bouts of restructuring, being sold for half a billion dollars, being sold again for around $40 million, seeing their front office occupied by Rupert Murdoch, Justin Timberlake and more, MySpace certainly has had a tumultuous last few years.

Their numbers have dropped dramatically and the average outsider’s view of this former social media titan has evolved into one that may be shared with the likes of Enron, Merrill Lynch, WaMu, the US Government, Planet Hollywood, Jessica Simpson’s edible body products (Dessert?), etc. These companies/institutions (and more) started out pretty sweet, but they all met an unfortunate end. Whether that be at the hands of complete morons, criminals, massive debt, horrid ideas, band-aide fixes on gaping wounds…….(and whatever else those other companies did, I’m just referencing the US government here), it made no difference, they were still the butt of many a joke. These companies have become models of what not to do in business. MySpace has been unfortunately and erroneously lumped in with this crowd.

Let’s break it down a bit, shall we? We begin with the doom-sayers. Those who have declared MySpace dead include Forbes (“Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone.”), Business Insider (“Now that Myspace all but dead, where are the artists going to go?” {Bad grammar is there’s. Editing, folks. Editing.}), RedWriteWeb (“Just like being a teenager, MySpace is something that most people grow out of.”), and Spydurhman from Twitpic (“Why is MySpace even an option? lol how silly. Don’t they know MySpace is dead?”).

These folks have all taken to their soap boxes to proclaim that MySpace is dead. They shout out to their followers that MySpace is a laughable property/option that should never be taken seriously ever again because their relevance and influence has waned to a point that makes them less than nothing.

Let’s expose some hypocrisy here. These folks speak of relevance. How is relevance measured online? Through unique visits. Let’s see how relevant MySpace is compared to the haters that I listed above. This should be fun.

Ready for a shock? MySpace has seen a resurgence in unique site visits in the past few months. Instead of remaining in a steady fall, the unique visits graph is beginning to climb again. In March, MySpace saw over 19 million unique visits. That’s up almost 2 million from February.

These haters (and others like them) that are trumpeting MySpace’s death can not touch their unique visit numbers. Forbes saw a little more than 10 million unique visits in March. Business Insider had a little more than 3 million. ReadWriteWeb could only muster a little more than 390,000. As for Spydurhman, to answer your question on why MySpace is an option for sharing a photo, that’s because MySpace saw almost 17 million more unique visitors than TwitPic.

And oh, by the way, after posing the question of where musicians should go to be seen and heard now that “MySpace is dead”, Business Insider suggests Gigmaven. While Gigmaven is a fun little site, it only received a little more than five…….thousand unique visits in March. Grand suggestion that, Business Insider!

There is a culture out in this big brave world that relishes failure. When failure is sensed, the dogs of war are let loose and the feeding frenzy begins, while, quietly, the supposedly failed service is busy restructuring, revamping and Timberlaking (new verb, copyright me).

Folks have counted out MySpace because 19 million visits in March is nowhere near the 170 million that Facebook posted. Well, newsflash everybody! MySpace has not been trying to be Facebook for quite some time now.

“MySpace has specialized,” says Oneupweb’s Social Media maven Sarah Peschel. “They are like the internet MTV now and suddenly I’m totally intrigued. Probably helps that they are featuring Santagold on the home page and I’m a huge fan.  I don’t think Facebook will ever disappear, but I can’t predict what their future will look like.  If they actually do incorporate bangin’ search capabilities, they’ll transform their future in a way that has them vying for pole position.  If they don’t, maybe they end up specializing in connecting organ donors with gracious recipients via Facebook interface.   The future is what you make it right?”

MySpace doesn’t care about Facebook disappearing. Sarah has, once again, hit the proverbial nail right on the noggin here. While everyone has been screaming “MYSPACE ESTA MUERTO!” MySpace has been busy looking to the future.

This site isn’t a joke. It isn’t a failure. It’s a property that spearheaded the social media revolution. But, like many revolutionary products, companies and services, it evolved into something that filled a niche market.

Name another online property that allows you free, unfettered access to your favorite music industry titans and up and comers. Go ahead. I’ll wait. You can’t. No other site on the web has the capabilities and resources that MySpace has when it comes to entertainment and the music industry. Not Twitter, not Facebook, not YouTube. No other site can give an artist the sort of exposure and platform that MySpace can.

Why MySpace? Why today? Because MySpace is a metaphor on business as a whole. Every company has a talent unique to them. Every industry has a need for that talent. True success comes in connecting that need with that talent. Facebook connects friends, family and stalkers. Twitter allows us to experience TMI. YouTube gives us all access into the private lives of strangers, and the ability to laugh at them when they hurt themselves.

MySpace has completely embraced every facet of online life that an artist will need to be viable in social media and they have allowed for it in one simple space.

Have an interesting post/pic/page on MySpace? Share it on Facebook.

That’s right. The Facebook share button is on MySpace.

MySpace will also post your Tweets in your daily feed.

YouTube, photo sharing, calendars and more, combined with all of MySpace’s unique features, will make this site the entertainment powerhouse of the future.

A site that is at the top its game within its niche is far from dead. I’m a huge fan of zombies and MySpace appears to be one of the originals. It is growing, it is dominating and it is spreading music to the masses no matter where you are.

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If you’re a fan of punk rock than there’s no question that you’re familiar with the Southern California institution Pennywise so break out your board shorts and sunscreen because we will premiering the band’s upcoming album All Or Nothing here on Myspace starting tomorrow.

Pennywise – “All Or Nothing”
.That’s right the album doesn’t come out until May 1st but you can hear it on their Myspace page all week leading up to its release. If you’re not familiar with the group for over 20 years the band have been perfecting the melodic punk rock sound that they helped pioneer, a process that’s culminating with the release of All Or Nothing.
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Pennywise have always had a strong bond with Myspace — in fact the band’s last album, 2008’s Reason To Believe was released on Myspace Records — so we couldn’t be happier to help Pennywise celebrate the next stage in their already unprecdented career. So how excited are you to hear Pennywise’s new album? Let us know in the comments section below as you listen to some Pennywise Radio!

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We're often quick to declare a social network "dead." Sure, plenty of them have come and gone in recent years, but few have had such a massive fall from grace as MySpace, which has come to be known as "DeadSpace." The unpronounceable "My____" logo rebranding did not help. Now it's rumored to be at the dawn of a complete overhaul, but this article isn't about that. It's about the hole that MySpace has left specifically in the music community.

MySpace was the first social network that I joined. I snubbed Friendster previously. I would riff about how odd it was to try to make friends online and how checking out your friends' friends encouraged leeches, moochers and social-climbing. But I caved into MySpace because it had some useful features for musicians. The first one that drew me in was simply the events listing. The year was 2006 and I was about to embark on my first extensive headlining tour. Here was a way for me to not only announce the dates but also post the flyer art and blast out updates if we decided to change venues or add more cities.

As I delved into its functionality, I found a complete set of features to serve the DIY artist. One that was surprisingly meaningful was the option of customizing your page's layout and background. The same way that producers were suddenly able to make their own music at home on affordable software, artists were more than ever in control of their image and branding. Before branding was even a buzzword, we were all recruiting our friends to help us learn basic HTML to design our MySpace pages.

Take my friend Kavinsky for example, of Drive soundtrack fame. I can assure you that in 2007 he was already MySpace-famous for having the coolest looking page on there, complete with a tri-dimensional Tron moving floor. Compare that to Facebook where everybody has the same blue-grey theme that looks like the Post Office. Then of course, before murders were committed over relationship statuses, there was the choice of "Top Friends." This was by far the most strategic chess move on the network. Placing someone in your Top 8 meant forging an alliance, one which you hoped would be reciprocated. You would put a few of your obvious allies, a couple of extended peers, and some oddball selections to show the depth of your character. A mysterious hot girl? David Lynch? An über-cool niche label from the '90s?

Even the most straightforward functions of MySpace haven't been replaced. Look at Facebook's Fan Pages. How do you post your songs on there? Most people use Bandpage, a third-party app developed by Root Music which you have to embed onto a tab and grab your songs from your SoundCloud account, yet another social network. It's astounding how complicated that is. MySpace had a music player where you could post six songs (another strategic selection from the artist), and non-musician users could grab one of your songs for their personal page, which turned the "Daily Plays" metric into an extremely useful measure of someone's popularity beyond their number of friends.

Are you nostalgic yet?
Think about it. I run a record label, Fool's Gold. We signed a great deal of our artists simply based on their MySpace pages. If I heard about a DJ, rapper or band, I would type out myspace.com/theirname and get their full list of tour dates and venues ("oh wow he's already playing Mercury Lounge"), their pictures, a glimpse of their aesthetics from the page design, their popularity and of course listen to their songs. What website gives your all that info today? None! We have to juggle data from SoundCloud, YouTube and Twitter into an esoteric algorithm that I haven't figured out yet. No wonder I haven't signed anyone in 2012. And you can forget searching for an artist website: MySpace made those obsolete, and now that it's gone it left a hole even bigger than before it arrived.

My final point about what MySpace brought to the music community is the ability to communicate. You could send a message to anyone, regardless of whether you were "friends." I'll give you an example: there's a German techno DJ called Boys Noize. I saw him DJ in Miami one year and although we ran in different circles back then, I wanted to tell him that loved his set and was a fan of his work so I wrote him a message. We spoke a couple times and he asked me to remix one of his songs. The whole thing was set up on MySpace. The remix was released and I won some sort of award in electronic music at the end of the year. The system worked! Now if you want to reach out to a peer that you don't know, you either look up their birth name and write to their personal Facebook page, which is very creepy, or you tweet them to follow you so that you can send them a short Direct Message. What is this, a telegram?

The point of this article isn't that I want MySpace to come back. It doesn't matter if it's MySpace or another site. I just want there to be a destination that gives me the full picture.

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The allure of MySpace may be long gone, but that hasn’t stopped Facebook from stealing a little musical inspiration from the former place for friends. Facebook today made music a much bigger part of the social networking experience with the release of the “Listen” button for artist and band Facebook Pages, powered by streaming music partners Spotify and MOG.

“The new button will give music fans an easy way to listen to songs through their favorite services, such as Spotify and MOG, directly from Facebook Pages,” a Facebook spokesperson explained to VentureBeat.

Here’s what this means: Say you land on Justin Bieber’s Facebook Page (accidentally, of course), you’ll now find a “Listen” button sandwiched between the “Like” and “Message” buttons. Click it and Facebook will auto-determine your preferred listening music application and then send you down the path of musical discovery by playing the Biebs’ tracks. “I was like baby, baby, baby oooh … “

Believe it or not, Facebook’s band and artist music experience is actually a tad clunkier than what MySpace offers. Because the music is provided by streaming parters Spotify and MOG, the process takes a few clicks and requires you to open the third-party applications.

Still, the feature is bound to have profound implications for musicians with Facebook Pages, especially considering that the underlying music services are Timeline apps. As such, listening activity will be posted to the listener’s Timeline and to the Ticker, amplifying the Facebook effect we’ve heard so much about in recent weeks. The “Listen” button is now live on all authenticated band and artist Pages, the Facebook rep said.

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Judge Reggie Walton doesn’t think much of social media. Number one, he thinks it’s inaccurate. “There’s a lot of stuff about me on the internet and half of it is totally wrong,” he noted as he warned jurors to avoid their favorite sites. “But unfortunately, it’s there.”

Number two, he thinks it could prejudice jurors in Roger Clemens’ perjury retrial, over which he is presiding in Washington, D.C. The result: Walton this morning warned potential jurors that he doesn’t want them checking the Internet. He singled out MySpace as verboten.

“There are some people that are addicted to the internet,” Walton said. “They have to go on the internet every day and they have to go on the internet to find out what they heard about. You can’t do that.”

The judge’s staff will be screening newspapers to give to the jury every day, deleting information about the case before they’re given to the jurors. Walton said he’s seen inaccurate information about various cases making its way to the news media and that jury can’t see that.

“If your life is going to be virtually destroyed by being here, please check yes,” he told jurors who weren’t prepared to accept his restrictions. “Otherwise, don’t.”

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Myspace is the world’s largest social networking website. It is the cool place to be if you are in your teens, 20s and 30s. I have also found that it can be an outstanding free marketing tool for social business and websites.

So what is Myspace.com? Myspace is a website where anybody in the world can create a free “personal” web page (i.e., my space). Once you have created your personal web page on myspace, then you can connect your page to other people’s myspace pages by clicking on a link to request to be a person’s friend. Once that person agrees to be your friend, then you and that person can email each other, chat with each other, leave comments on each other’s myspace pages, and read each other’s blogs. There is no limit to the number of friends you can have and some of the more popular people on myspace have millions of myspace friends and have actually become Internet celebrities and have been featured on talk shows.

Over the past year I have been conducting test marketing on myspace for a couple of my clients and I have discovered that myspace can be a very good free marketing tool for businesses. However, myspace is not for all businesses. The types of business that will do well having a myspace page are the “cool” types of businesses that want to market to people in their 20s and 30s. Businesses that will have luck marketing on myspace include bars, clubs, “hip” clothing stores, and cool Internet websites.

Here is how to market your business on myspace.

1. Go to myspace.com and create a free profile. Make sure to talk first about yourself and then about your business. However, you must consider your myspace page a personal page where you talk mostly about you and a little about your business. Do not just talk about your business because if you do, people will not want to be your friend. You need to focus on the personal aspect such as, “hey this is me and my life. And by the way I run this Internet website that sells cool t-shirts.” If you think of myspace as a place to network and meet friends FIRST and market your business SECOND, then you will do well on myspace.

2. Once you have created your myspace page, click the browse link to find the type of people you want to market to. You can search by gender, age, location, ethnicity, etc.

3. Go to each person’s page and click their “Add to friends” link. The person will either approve you or deny you. If they approve you, your myspace page and their myspace page will be connected as being friends.

4. To market your business, post friendly personalized bulletins. When you post a bulletin, a link to your bulletin will be posted on each of your friend’s myspace pages. If you have 5,000 myspace friends, than you can literally have a message sent to all 5,000 of these people for free. However, remember that you must be personal with your messages. Talk like you are talking to your best friend. Do NOT talk to people like customers. Myspace is a place for friends and you must respect that.

5. Post friendly comments on your myspace friends’ pages and include a link to your website. Then, everybody who goes to your friend’s myspace page will see your comment and your link. Some will click on your picture to become your friend and some will click on the link to go to your website.

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